Grammar
Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she's a conjugated verb.
She's been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:
some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We're all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,
we've all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.
—Tony Hoagland
This poem is filled to the brim! Metaphor, imagery, allusion, catch phrase, etc. (maybe we should make a list of all of the concepts that a poem can has, so we can recognize them better- this would also help in writing poems!). I like the creative flow and lines: "We're all attracted to the perfume of fermenting joy", "We've all tried to start a fire...", "and when we see it, what we do is natual: we take our burned hands out of our pockets, and clap". I love the paralells of fire in the last stanza- even beauty being a fire to the self, to others, and the own fire that we cultivate- but the burned hands are the best....we do what we should do, even when it hurts.
ReplyDeleteThis is an incredible poem. I'm impressed that a poem about grammar and having sex in the first stanza can be so packed with meaning as you mention AJ.
ReplyDeleteMaxine is not judged or sexualized in this poem. She is a symbol of beauty and confidence.
It's also cool that a man wrote this poem too. He is a feminist witnessing this strong young woman.
I concur! I'd like to read more Tony Hoagland. I just looked up his bio after reading your comment and sources say Hoagland "attended and dropped out of several colleges, picked apples and cherries in the Northwest, lived in communes, followed the Grateful Dead and became a Buddhist."[4] He taught in the University of Houston creative writing program."
ReplyDeleteI suppose that is where we get this incredibly professional use of grammar with real life experience. What a poet, indeed!